Bush’s Campaign to Be Seen as Another Truman

By Jonathan Alter -
Apr 26, 2013

The dedication this week of the
George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum was more than an
opportunity for the five living U.S. presidents to compare notes
on what Stefan Lorant called “the glorious burden” of the
office.

It also was the beginning of Bush’s campaign for
rehabilitation. As Bill Clinton said at the ceremony, all
presidential libraries are attempts “to rewrite history.”

Bush’s ultimate goal -- already hawked by his former
political adviser Karl Rove -- is to become another Harry S. Truman, a regular-guy commander-in-chief whose stock rose
sharply about 20 years after he left office.

The superficial comparisons are intriguing. Vice President
Truman only became president because Franklin D. Roosevelt died
in office in 1945. The failed haberdasher and product of the
Kansas City political machine was unlikely to make it to the top
on his own. He was a plain-spoken, unpretentious man who cared
enough about racial injustice that he desegregated the armed
forces.

Bush became president because he was born on third base, to
paraphrase Texas Governor Ann Richards’s quip about his father,
and because of the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore in
2000; an unexceptional man who drank heavily until he was 40
probably wouldn’t have made it on his own. He’s a blunt,
compassionate conservative who, as Jimmy Carter pointed out at
the dedication, saw the ravages of AIDS in Africa and elsewhere
and did something about it. (Bush also appointed two black
secretaries of state.)

Korean War

Like Iraq in Bush’s era, the Korean War was hugely
unpopular when Truman left office in 1953, and his decision to
drop two atomic bombs on Japan was at least as controversial as
Bush’s support for torture.

Still, you don’t have to be Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to know
that the differences between Bush and Truman are much greater
than the similarities.

In Korea, Truman was responding to communist aggression,
not hyping unconfirmed stories about weapons of mass
destruction.

While Truman’s “Marshall Plan” (named for his secretary of
state, George C. Marshall) produced spectacular results in
postwar Europe, Bush apparently didn’t even have a plan for
postwar Iraq.

His decision to disband the Iraqi army was catastrophic.
Iraq and the simultaneous neglect of Afghanistan are only the
best-known Bush administration fiascos that are all but
airbrushed out of the museum, though not out of the historical
record.

A broader list would include weakening bank-capital
requirements and prohibitions on predatory lending that helped
pave the way for the financial crisis; botching the response to
Hurricane Katrina; gutting federal rules on worker safety,
education, veterans’ affairs and other protections; endorsing a
constitutional amendment banning gay marriage; editing climate-
change reports to the specifications of ideologues; reinstating
the global gag rule on family planning in deference to right-
wing anti-abortion activists, and politicizing appointments to
the federal bench and federal law enforcement.

All this is ignored by Bush apologists. Ed Gillespie, a
longtime Republican operative who last year helped the party’s
presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, offered a defense of Bush in
National Review that sought to absolve him of any blame for the
budget deficit. As if the trillion-dollar wars, unaffordable tax
cuts, the $550 billion (unpaid-for) prescription-drug benefit
and hundreds of billions of lost revenue in the recession that
began on his watch could be erased from history.

‘Decision Theater’

The new museum on the campus of Southern Methodist
University in Dallas is cleverly designed to subsume Bush’s
record within the burdens of the presidency. It includes a
“Decision Theater” that puts visitors in the shoes of a
president forced to make tough calls on a variety of pressing
issues.

The subtext is that this is an extremely hard job and that
you, the visitor, couldn’t do it any better than Bush did.

While this may make for a thought-provoking museum
experience, it’s a low bar for presidential performance.
Allowing for some mistakes, we should admire our presidents not
because they have to face tough decisions but for making the
right ones.

The “moral clarity” that is Bush’s claim to presidential
respectability is only worth something if it results in clear
achievement.

As a sign that even Bush knows his batting average on big
decisions was low, the museum barely mentions Vice President
Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and other
officials who helped him make them.

Cheney’s churlish behavior and frequent shots at President
Barack Obama over the last four years have made Bush, who has
refrained from criticism, look restrained and classy by
comparison.

But you can’t flush a disastrous war down the memory hole.
At the dedication, the word “Iraq” wasn’t mentioned once, and
the museum covers the subject in a section devoted to “the
Global War on Terror.”

Continuing to conflate Iraq with the Sept. 11 attacks is an
insult to truth that historians will never be able to overlook.

On Sept. 14, 2001, I was in the White House press pool and
was 5 feet from Bush as he stood atop a crushed truck as rescue
workers at Ground Zero shouted that they couldn’t hear the
president speak.

“I can hear you! I can hear you,” Bush said through a
bullhorn. “The rest of the world hears you, and the people who
knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” It was
a defining moment for his presidency.

The problem that Bush can never get around is that “the
people who knocked these buildings down” --- namely, Osama bin Laden -- didn’t hear from Bush, while others unconnected to the
attacks did.

The bullhorn is in the museum. And so is the bull.

(Jonathan Alter is a Bloomberg View columnist and the
author of “The Promise: President Obama, Year One.” The
opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this article:
Jonathan Alter at alterjonathan@gmail.com